by Peter Watts
“Maybe not. But I bet all the clinicals in the world are assholes.”
“You’re not,” she said.
She stared at him with serious, dark eyes. He couldn’t stop smelling her. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to hug her. He wanted to gut her like a fish and put her head on a stick.
He gritted his teeth and kept silent.
“Ever hear of the trolly paradox?” Alice said after a moment.
Desjardins shook his head.
“Six people on a runaway train, headed off a cliff. The only way to save them is switch the train to another track. Except there’s someone else standing on that track, and he won’t be able to get out of the way before the train squashes him. Do you reroute?”
“Of course.” It was the greater good at its most simplistic.
“Now say you can’t reroute the train, but you can stop it by pushing someone into its path. Do you?”
“Sure,” he said immediately.
“I did that for you,” Alice pronounced.
“Did what?”
“Most people don’t accept the equivalence. They think it’s right to reroute the train, but wrong to push someone in front of it. Even though it’s exactly the same death, for exactly the same number of lives saved.”
He grunted.
“Conscience isn’t rational, Achilles. You know what parts of your brain light up when you make a moral decision? I’ll tell you: the medial frontal gyrus. The posterior cingulate gyrus. The angular gyrus. All—”
“Emotional centers,” Desjardins cut in.
“Damn right. The frontal lobes don’t spark at all. And even people who recognise the logical equivalence of those scenarios have to really work at it. It just feels wrong to push someone to their death, even for the same net gain of lives. The brain has to wrestle with all this stupid, unfounded guilt. It takes longer to act, longer to reach critical decisions, and when all’s said and done it’s less likely to make the right decion. That’s what conscience is, Killjoy. It’s like rape or greed or kin selection—it served its purpose a few million years ago, but it’s been bad news ever since we stopped merely surviving our environment and started dominating it instead.”
You rehearsed that, Desjardins thought.
He allowed himself a small smile. “There’s a bit more to people than guilt and intellect, my dear. Maybe guilt doesn’t just hobble the mind, did you ever think of that? Maybe it hobbles other things as well.”
“Like what?”
“Well, just for example—” he paused, pretending to cast around for inspiration— “how do you know I’m not some kind of crazed serial killer? How do you know I’m not psychotic, or suicidal, or, or into torture, say?”
“I’d know,” Alice said simply.
“You think sex killers walk around with signs on their foreheads?”
She squeezed his thigh. “I think that I’ve known you for a whole long time, and I think there’s no such thing as a perfect act. If someone was that full of hate, they’d slip up eventually. But you—well, I’ve never heard of a monster who respected women so much he refused to even fuck them. And by the way, you might want to reconsider that particular position. Just a thought.”
Desjardins shook his head. “You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?”
“Completely. And I’ve got oodles of patience.”
“Good. Now you can use some of it.” He stood and smiled down at her. “I’ve gotta go to the bathroom for a minute. Make yourself at home.”
She smiled back. “I will indeed. Take your time.”
He locked the door, leaned across the sink and stared hard into the mirror. His reflection stared back, furious.
She betrayed you. She turned you into this.
He liked her. He loved her. Alice Jovellanos had been his loyal friend for years. Desjardins hung onto that as best he could.
She did it on purpose.
No. They had done in on purpose.
Because Alice hadn’t acted alone. She was damn smart, but she hadn’t come up with Spartacus all by herself. She had friends, she’d admitted as much: We’re kinda political, in a ragtag kind of way, she’d said when she first broke the news of his—his emancipation.
He could feel the chains in his head crumbling to rust. He could feel his own depravity tugging on those corroded links, and grinning. He searched himself for some hint of the regret he’d felt just a few minutes ago—he’d hurt Alice’s feelings, and he’d felt bad about it. He could still do that. He could still feel remorse, or something like it, if he only tried.
You’re not a slave to your impulses, she’d said.
That was true, as far as it went. He could restrain himself if he wanted to. But that was the nature of his predicament: he was starting to realise that he didn’t want to.
“Hey, Killjoy?” Alice called from down the hall.
Shut up! SHUT UP! “Yeah?”
“Mandelbrot’s demanding dinner and his feeder’s empty. Didn’t you keep the kibble under the sink?”
“Not any more. She figured out how to break into the cupboards.”
“Then wh—”
“Bedroom closet.”
Her footsteps passed on the other side of the door, Mandelbrot vocally urging them on.
On purpose.
Alice had infected him ahead of schedule, to clear his mind for the fight against ßehemoth—and perhaps for more personal reasons, conscious or otherwise. But her friends had set their sights a lot higher than Achilles Desjardins; they were out to liberate every ’lawbreaker on the planet. Lubin had summed it up, there in the darkness two weeks ago: “Only a few thousand people with their hands on all the world’s kill switches and you’ve turned them all into clinical sociopaths...”
Desjardins wondered if Alice would have tried her semantic arguments with Lubin. If she had been tied to that chair, blind, pissing her pants in fear for her life while that murderous cipher paced around her in the darkness, would she have presumed to lecture him on serotonin levels and the cingulate gyrus?
She might have, at that. After all, she and her friends were political—in a ragtag kinda way—and politics made you stupid. It made you think that Human decency was some kind of Platonic ideal, a moral calculus you could derive from first principals. Don’t waste your time with basic biology. Don’t worry about the fate of altruists in Darwin’s Universe. People are different, people are special, people are moral agents. That’s what you got when you spent too much time writing manifestos, and not enough time looking in the mirror.
Achilles Desjardins was only the first of a new breed. Before long there would be others, as powerful as he and as unconstrained. Maybe there already were. Alice hadn’t told him any details. He didn’t know how far the ambitions of the Spartacus Society had progressed. He didn’t know what other franchises were being seeded, or what the incubation period was. He only knew that sooner or later, he would have competition.
Unless he acted now, while he still had the advantage.
Mandelbrot was still yowling in the bedroom, evidently dissatisfied with the quality of the hired help. Desjardins couldn’t blame her; Alice had had more than enough time to retrieve the kibble, bring it back to the kitchen, and—
—in the bedroom, he realised.
Well, he thought after a moment. I guess that settles it.
Suddenly, the face in the mirror was very calm. It did not move, but it seemed to be speaking to him all the same. You’re not political, it told him. You’re mechanical. Nature programmed you one way, CSIRA programmed you another, Alice came along and rewired you for something else. None of it is you, and all of it is you. And none of it was your choice. None of it was your responsibility.
She did this to you. That cunt. That stumpfuck. Whatever happens now is not your fault.
It’s hers.
He unlocked the door and walked down the hall to the bedroom. Live telltales twinkled across the sensorium on his pillow. His feedback suit lay across the bed like
a shed skin. Alice Jovellanos stood shaking at the foot of the bed, lifting the headset from her skull. Her face was beautiful and bloodless.
She would not have been able to mistake the victim in that virtual dungeon for anyone else. Desjardins had tuned the specs to three decimal places.
Mandelbrot immediately gave up on Alice and began head-butting Desjardins, purring loudly. Desjardins ignored her.
“I need some technical info,” he said, almost apologetically. “And some details on your friends. I was actually hoping to sweet-talk it out of you, though.” He gestured at the sensorium, savoring the horror on her face. “Guess I forgot to put that stuff away.”
She shook her head, a spasm, a panicky twitch. “I—I d-don’t think you did...” she managed after a moment.
“Maybe not.” Achilles shrugged. “But hey, look on the bright side. That’s the first time you’ve actually been right about me.”
It made sense, at last: the impulse purchases routed almost unconsciously through anonymous credit lines, the plastic sheeting and portable incinerator, the dynamic-inversion sound damper. The casual snoop into Alice’s master calendar and contact list. That was the great thing about being a ’lawbreaker on the Trip; when everybody knew you were chained to the post, nobody bothered putting up fences around the yard.
“Please,” Alice quavered, her lip trembling, her eyes bright and terrified. “Achilles...”
Somewhere in the basement of Desjardins’s mind, a last rusty link crumbled to powder.
“Call me Killjoy,” he said.
Automechanica
The first round goes to the corpses.
A rifter by the name of Lisbeth Mak—kind of a wallflower, Clarke barely even remembers the name— came upon a corpse crawling like an armored cockroach around the outside of the primary physical plant. It didn’t matter whether he had a good reason to be there. It didn’t matter whether or not this constituted a violation of quarantine. Mak did what a lot of fish-heads might have done regardless; she got cocky. Decided to teach this stumpfucking dryback a lesson, but decided to warm him up first. So she swam easy circles around her helpless and lumbering prey, made the usual derisive comments about diving bells with feet, called loudly and conspicuously for someone to bring her one of those pneumatic drills from the tool shed: she had herself a crab to shell.
She forgot entirely about the headlamp on the corpse’s helmet. It hadn’t been shining when she caught the poor fucker—obviously he’d been trying to avoid detection, and there was enough ambient light around that part of the structure even for dryback eyes. When he flashed that peeper at her, her eyecaps turned dead flat white in their haste to compensate.
She was only blind for a second or two, but it was more than enough for the corpse to get his licks in. Preshmesh vs. copolymer is no contest at all. By the time Mak, bruised and bloodied, called for backup, the corpse was already heading back inside.
Now Clarke and Lubin stand in Airlock Five while the ocean drains away around them. Clarke splits her face seal, feels herself reinflate like a fleshy balloon. The inner hatch hisses and swings open. Bright light, painfully intense, spills in from the space beyond. Clarke steps back as her eyecaps adjust, raising her hands against possible attack. None comes. A gang of corpses jam the wet room, but only one stands in the front rank: Patricia Rowan.
Between Rowan and rifters, an isolation membrane swirls with oily iridescence.
“The consensus is that you should stay in the airlock for the time being,” Rowan says.
Clarke glances at Lubin. He’s watching the welcoming committee with blank, impassive eyes.
“Who was it?” Clarke asks calmly.
“I don’t think that’s really important,” Rowan says.
“Lisbeth might think otherwise. Her nose is broken.”
“Our man says he was defending himself.”
“A man in 300-bar preshmesh armor defending himself against an unarmed woman in a diveskin.”
“A corpse defending himself from a fishhead,” someone says from within the committee. “Whole other thing.”
Rowan ignores the intrusion. “Our man resorted to fists,” she says, “because that was the only approach that had any real hope of succeeding. You know as well as we do what we’re defending ourselves from.”
“What I know is that none of you are supposed to leave Atlantis without prior authorization. Those were the rules, even before the quarantine. You agreed to them.”
“We weren’t allowed much of a choice,” Rowan remarks mildly.
“Still.”
“Fuck the rules,” says another corpse. “They’re trying to kill us. Why are we arguing protocol?”
Clarke blinks. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know damn well what it—”
Rowan holds up a hand. The dissident falls silent.
“We found a mine,” Rowan says, in the same voice she might use to report that the head was out of toilet paper.
“What?”
“Nothing special. Standard demolition charge. Might have even been one of the same ones Ken wired up before we—” She hesitates, choosing her words— “came to terms a few years back. I’m told it would have isolated us from primary life-support and flooded a good chunk of Res-C. Somewhere between thirty to a hundred killed from the implosion alone.”
Clarke stares at Lubin, notes the slightest shake of the head.
“I didn’t know,” Clarke says softly.
Rowan smiles faintly. “You’ll understand there might be some skepticism on that point.”
“I’d like to see it,” Lubin says.
“I’d like to see my daughter in the sunlight,” Rowan tells him. “It’s not going to happen.”
Clarke shakes her head. “Pat, listen. I don’t know where it came from. I—”
“I do,” Rowan says mildly. “There are piles of them stashed at the construction caches. A hundred or more at Impossible Lake alone.”
“We’ll find out who planted it. But you can’t keep it. You’re not allowed weapons.”
“Do you seriously expect us to simply hand it back to the people who planted it in the first place?”
“Pat, you know me.”
“I know all of you,” Rowan says. “The answer is no.”
“How did you find it?” Lubin asks from out of left field.
“By accident. We lost our passive acoustics and sent someone out to check the antennae.”
“Without informing us beforehand.”
“It seemed fairly likely that you people were causing the interference. Informing you would not have been a wise idea even if you hadn’t been mining our hulls.”
“Hulls,” Lubin remarks. “So you found more than one.”
No one speaks.
Of course not, Clarke realizes. They’re not going to tell us anything. They’re gearing up for war.
And they’re going to get slaughtered…
“I wonder if you’ve found them all,” Lubin muses.
They stand without speaking, gagged by the synthetic black skin across their faces. Behind their backs, behind the impenetrable mass of the inner hatch, the corpses return to whatever plots and counterplans they’re drawing. Ahead, past the outer hatch, a gathering crowd of rifters waits for answers. Around them and within them, machinery pumps and sparks and readies them for the abyss. By the time the water rises over their heads they are incompressible.
Lubin reaches for the outer hatch. Clarke stops him.
“Grace,” she buzzes.
“Could be anyone.” He rises, weightless in the flooded compartment. One hand reaches up to keep the ceiling at bay. It’s an odd image, this humanoid silhouette floating against the bluish-white walls of the airlock. His eyecaps almost look like holes cut from black paper, letting the light shine through from behind.
“In fact,” he continues, “I’m not entirely convinced they’re telling the truth.”
“The corpses? Why would they lie? How would it
serve them?”
“Sow dissension among the enemy. Divide and conquer.”
“Come on, Ken. It’s not as though there’s a pro-corpse faction ready to rise up on their behalf and...”
He just looks at her.
“You don’t know,” she buzzes, so softly she can barely feel the vibration in her own jaw. “It’s all just guesses and suspicions. Rama hasn’t had a chance to—you can’t be sure.”
“I’m not.”
“We don’t really know anything.” She hesitates, then edits herself: “I don’t know anything. You do.”
“Not enough to matter. Not yet.”
“I saw you, tracking them along the corridors.”
He doesn’t nod. He doesn’t have to.
“Who?”
“Rowan, mainly.”
“And what’s it like in there?”
“A lot like it is in there,” he says, pointing at her.
Stay out of my head, you fucker. But she knows, at this range, it’s not a matter of choice. You can’t just choose to not feel something. Whether those feelings are yours or someone else’s is really beside the point.
So she only says, “Think you could be a little less vague?”
“She feels very guilty about something. I don’t know what. There’s no shortage of possibilities.”
“Told you.”
“Our own people, though,” he continues. “Are not quite so conflicted, and much more easily distracted. And I can’t be everywhere. And we’re running out of time.”
You bastard, she thinks. You asshole. You stumpfucker.
He floats above her, waiting.
“Okay,” she says at last. “I’ll do it.”
Lubin pulls the latch. The outer hatch slides back, opening a rectangle of murky darkness in a stark white frame. They rise into a nightscape stippled with waiting eyes.
Lenie Clarke is a little bit twisted, even by Rifter standards.
Rifters don’t worry much about privacy, for one thing. Not as much as you might expect from a population of rejects and throwaways. You might think the only ones who could ever regard this place as an improvement would be those with the most seriously fucked-up baselines for comparison, and you’d be right. You might also think that such damaged creatures would retreat into their shells like hermit crabs with half their limbs ripped away, cringing at the slightest shadow, or lashing out furiously at any hint of intrusion. It does happen, occasionally. But down here, the endless heavy night anesthetizes even if it doesn’t heal. The abyss lays dark hands on the wounded and the raging, and somehow calms them. There are, after all, three hundred sixty degrees of escape from any conflict. There are no limiting resources to fight over; these days, half the habs are empty anyway. There is little need for territoriality, because there is so much territory.
